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amey
SoYaap
When I saw his plans to cut up his own AWOL it was the incentive I needed to reach out and ask him to do some modifications on my own.
These were ideas that had been in my brain for a long time but truth be told this bike had fallen into disuse for a while. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, doing a PhD can be a bit all consuming at times and while I’ve still been riding regularly, I’ve become more sucked into cycling purely for exercise. This means more often than not doing the same few 1-1.5 hour loops and riding fast to fit my schedule. One day though, I took the AWOL out and went for a long meandering ride with flat pedals, a sandwich, no Garmin and no route in mind. It bucketed with rain for 4 hours but it was one of those rides that reminds you why you love cycling in the first place and particularly why I love this bike. I was determined to do less of the roadie adjacent riding and get back to more rambling.
I bought the AWOL as a frame and forks back in maybe 2016/2017. Since then it’s been in 15 different countries, as well as being split down into parts and rebuilt more times than that. At one point I thought about having S&S couplers fitted but then the chainstay cracked so I thought that wouldn’t be a good investment. It’s a small thing but I’d also always been slightly annoyed by the QR rear end especially as more of my bikes moved to Thru-axles. I also wanted a few more purely aesthetic modifications like bosses for a bolt on frame bag and a segmented fork which everyone knows are the coolest. Thankfully, Mads was happy to oblige all of these wishes.
Building it back up will be a bit a slow process as my living situation means I’m between two countries so often it’s several weeks before I see the bike again. Next stop though is to get it powder-coated. I’ve found a place in Berlin that looks to have a lot of experience with bikes and offers some nice metallic shades. I’ve had brain worms about picking a colour for months but I think I’ve narrowed it down to two.